Gamescom Interviews
A few of the European fansites were lucky enough to have some interview time with the developers, so we have a quick summary of the interviews below. If you want to read the full thing, check out Vanion, Buffed, NinjaPull, and Gamestar.

Misc

It is very unlikely that you will see Pet Battles on your phone.

The Valor Upgrade system will not be released with Mists of Pandaria and may not be added in the following patches. There are too many items that you would have to upgrade and the system would end up too complicated.

In the past they have created too many zones, as most players are rushing to the level cap. Mists of Pandaria has done it again to some extent, but you should be able to do a good part of each zone while leveling.

Mists of Pandaria is starting with more end game content than any previous expansion.

As the art in the game becomes higher resolution and more complex, it takes more time to create, limiting the rate of new content.

Dungeons and Raids

The two world bosses will be available on release day.

The one week delay before the first raid becomes available is to allow players to get prepared and not have to do things like taking time off of work to stay competitive.

As soon as a guild has completed normal mode of Mogu'shan Vaults, they can begin heroic mode (after the next reset).

After four weeks the Heart of Fear and Terrace of Endless Spring will become available, with better loot and a higher difficulty than Mogu'shan Vaults.

Cataclysm dungeons were too hard because they were tuned for groups of friends and guild members, rather than random people from the Dungeon Finder. Random groups don't guarantee progression from mistakes.

Mists of Pandaria will continue with reduced difficulty of Heroic Dungeons, but coordinated players will find more fun content in Challenge Modes. You can't outgear them, you can only win by getting better. Leaderboards are still planned to allow you to compete with armory.

Future Content

Patch 5.1 will bring the Horde and Alliance army to Pandaria and the story will focus on Varian Wrynn and Garrosh Hellscream.

There is a lot of story to be told in the patches leading up to the battle with Garrosh. Part of the story in this expansion is the war between the Alliance and Horde reigniting after they have banded together to save the world by defeating Deathwing and similar foes. Pandaria can change people, and we will see that with Garrosh.

Patch releasing timing will hopefully be shorter during this expansion, especially towards the end of the expansion. This has to be balanced with the fact that there is only one team working on the next expansion and a final patch for this expansion.

Beta Experience Required to Level Changed
Once again, the experience required to level in beta has been tweaked. This time around the XP needed to level from 85 to 90 was reduced from the original increase. It is now 30% higher than it was originally during beta.

It’s now easier than ever to stay in touch with your guildmates and access the World of Warcraft® auction house... wherever you go.

Starting today, all of the features that were previously part of the optional World of Warcraft Remote subscription service are now available for free to all World of Warcraft subscribers. These features include:

Remote Auction House – Bid on items, create auctions, and collect gold via your mobile device or through the official World of Warcraft website.

We hope this change will make it easier for players to stay connected to each other and to the game, and we encourage everyone to try out these powerful tools for themselves.

As a reminder, to take full advantage of these features, you’ll need the World of Warcraft Mobile Armory app, available for free for your Android™ device, iPhone®, or iPod® touch. The app also includes a number of other handy tools:

To access the web-based Auction House, simply visit www.worldofwarcraft.com, log in with your Battle.net® account, view your character profile, and click the Auctions link on the left-hand menu of the profile page.

If you’re a current World of Warcraft Remote subscriber, you’ll receive an email from Blizzard soon with more information about the end of your subscription. In the meantime, you do not need to take any action.

Upcoming LFR Changes

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Hello my fellow non-murloc creatures of Azeroth,

Please allow me to chip in with a few updated bits of information about LFR, I hope that you view this as an improvement and a step in the right direction over the current version of LFR. We do hear you and your feedback is seriously taken into consideration each time we decide to apply any change to the game.

We know that competitive players seem to dislike the idea of having to go through LFR to get some upgrades and that some will always go there as long as there is any chance at all of getting the slightest competitive advantage from it.

Of course we would prefer that LFR wasn’t part of the progression path for guilds that are raiding normal/heroic content, and so we have made some additional adjustments for the next iteration of LFR, for example:

Currently we have two separate item levels in LFR, items from the last 2 encounters have a level of 390, while the rest have 384, this made the LFR gear from Deathwing a bit too attractive for just about everyone, including hardcore raiders, so we’ve decided that this needed to be changed for MoP.

Our initial intention was that this difference would work as a special reward for beating such difficult encounters but that didn’t really translate in LFR since those encounters don’t have a difficulty that is relevant enough for this reward to be warranted.
Basically our intention for MoP is that if we decide to give a slight bump and increase the loot table ilvl of end bosses, that same bump won’t be applied to LFR but only to normal/heroic modes.

While the LFR gear from a new tier will continue to be slightly better than the normal difficulty items from the previous tier, we’ll structure the power level of future tiers’ LFR loot so that it doesn’t replace Heroic gear from the previous raid, and we’re continuing to discuss other solutions internally to limit the pressure for competitive raiders to run LFR.

We’ve also made a slight change on how Terrace of Endless Spring and Heart of Fear are going to roll out. These two raids will still be split into three separate queues for LFR, but we no longer plan to release them all on the same day, instead, we’ll unlock one queue each week. We hope that by the time all of the bosses are available in LFR, organized raiders will have had two full weeks to work on normal difficulty and one week for Heroic difficulty.

While I don’t expect this to completely stop raiding guilds from feeling some need to go into LFR, I hope that it will provide less incentive, they shouldn’t feel obligated to continue running LFR for a long time on top of their normal/heroic progression, I’d say if LFR remains somewhat interesting for 2-3 weeks to some players that want one or two specific items from there, that’s not such a big issue.

Beta Class Balance Analysis

Originally Posted by Blizzard
(Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

As you can imagine, we’ve been extremely busy lately and so we’ve gotten behind on answering your theorycrafting questions posted in the original Beta Class Balance Analysis thread. Rest assured, we’re still reading and appreciating the feedback. Keep it coming! As you may be able to tell from the changes in the recent builds, we’re generally tweaking damage, healing, and other attributes up and down to get balance just right. This is an iterative process so you may see alternating buffs and nerfs to your class between builds.

We’re getting progressively closer to balance with each build. Despite some of the proclamations we’ve read lately, no class is intended to be on the bottom of the meters. The difference between the highest and the lowest DPS in the latest build is not 30%, 20%, or even 10%. Though certain fights may favor specific specs, we’re actually seeing most specs within 5% of each other. There are a few exceptions, however, which we intend to bring in line soon: Subtlety, Frost DKs, and Frost mages. Most are actually within 2% but the few in the 2-5% range (Arms, Fury, Marksmanship, Survival) will also be brought in line soon as well. Of course, we’ll be vigilant with keeping an eye on balance and making necessary tuning tweaks as time permits.

We understand that some of the theorycrafting community may disagree with the numbers. This tends to be because they’re doing things that we don’t expect, or because the theorycrafting is inaccurate. There’s certainly going to be some confusion, but one of the goals of this thread is to provide accurate clarification. If you’re seeing substantial differences between specs, please try to identify where the discrepancies are. If a spec seems overpowered or underpowered according to the theorycraft, double-check it for accuracy by comparing it to actual results. If that checks out, maybe there’s something that you’re doing that we don’t expect; please present that info in a concise way, with as much supporting evidence (both theorycraft and especially actual log parses) as possible. We can’t debug everyone’s theorycraft, but we can try to identify large discrepancies.

Now, to catch up on questions…

Regarding racial expertise and weapons, I would like to know what would happen in the following scenario: 7.50% on-gear hit rating, 6.50% on-gear expertise, Main hand Axe, Off hand Sword, racial expertise (either sword or axe). Would you be spell hit capped or not?
OK, update on spell hit from expertise from weapon racials: It should count expertise on your main hand as spell hit. In the situation you described, an orc (axe racial, which is in the MH) would be spell hit capped, and a human (sword racial, which is in the OH) would not. The character sheet UI should properly reflect this, however, there’s currently a bug on beta where it’s not actually giving you this benefit. That will be fixed soon.

What is the design intent behind the engineer MoP "bomb" G91 Landshark? Currently on the beta it can be used by anyone, engineer or not, and has a 1 min cooldown but can only be used once per fight. Are these intended to be sellable to all players?
Yes, there are several engineer-created items in Mists which are usable by non-engineers and sellable. These are indeed intended to be usable as consumables in raids. However, the Landsharks you mentioned share a cooldown with combat potions so these are an alternative.

Death Knight (Forums / Skills)For the past several builds Death Knights have been seeing data mined info for Death Coil showing a 1.2x multiplier for the Unholy spec. We initially thought this was to account for the loss of the Morbidity talent, however we haven't see this actually make it onto the servers. Is this multiplier intended to be there and if so will we be seeing it in a future build?
We’re not sure what 1.2x multiplier you’re seeing; can you point it out? We believe it’s doing the correct amount of damage so perhaps there’s a tooltip bug.

Druid (Forums / Skills)There have been reports of absolutely ridiculous amounts of DPS being done with HotW. As a Guardian, Wrath is hitting for ~140k with a SP weapon when active. Similar values are being reported for Healing Touch. I know I've been saying that HotW needed a buff, but even I think that's a little on the overboard side of things.
The intention was that HotW allows you to DPS as strong as an equally-geared druid of each other spec on average. In other words, if a Guardian druid can Wrath for 140k with a 2sec cast, that’s 70k DPS before haste and crit. However, we’re not sure what gear exactly that was in, or with what cooldowns involved (it does seem on the high side). If you do any testing of how much DPS each spec can do while HotW’d into each other spec, we’d be very interested in seeing it. It’s quite possible that we over-buffed some of the combinations.

Hunter (Forums / Skills)Cobra Strike Behaviour(possible bug) - As stated on the tooltip, it's supposed to make the next 2 pet's basic hits, a critical hit. However I've done much testing on this subject and it appears that it does not behave in the way that it should be.
Also sounds like a bug. We’ll look into that, too.

Let me restate the point that Lissanna (and GC) were making. Your question, as posed, is based on the 37K difference you see in the sims. The sims are not data. They are tools to help point at where we should look for data. If the number 37K makes you itch, then look for or generate real data (i.e., logs) from the game that support your concern. A large spread in the sim might mean there's a large spread in the game. But it's more likely that the high and low classes have small sim bugs that push them up or down. It's also more likely that the sim action profiles of the low classes could be improved. Your question may be a good question, but again, as posed, it's unsupported.

For hunters, for example, MM has been consistently low in the sims. Based on that, I would try to confirm that in game, not whine at Blizzard that MM sucks. It led Zeherah and I to find a bug in how the T14 4-piece bonus was implemented (in sims) that disproportionately affected MM. Whitefyst identified priority bogosities (e.g., glaive toss may be a dps loss during careful aim). It pointed to a missing ICD for lock and load (because SV was simmed as too many LnL procs). On the flip side, the sims have also led to improvements in the game: e.g., they point to places where MM could potentially haste cap (and Blizzard fixed it), noted that it now could now crit cap (which may be deliberate), where focus fire would not be worth using (Blizzard tweaked it), etc.

So again, if you don't like the number from a sim, dig in and understand it better. Then find a real issue with real data.
This is an awesome post!

Monk (Forums / Skills)GC, since you have access to the internal gear stat budgets, can you tell me whether it should it be viable for Monks to use Strength [Parry + Dodge/Mastery] gear (Cloaks, Necks, Rings) and should Brewmasters be getting Parry from Strength like Plate Tanks do?
No, only the plate tanks get significant parry from Strength. Brewmasters should be wearing Agility jewelry.

We removed Tiger Strikes from Brewmasters and adjusted the proc rates of Elusive Brew and Gift of the Ox to account for the reduced number of normal attacks that they'll be doing. Please explain this change
Sure. Tiger Strikes was removed, but we didn’t want to nerf the proc rate of Elusive Brew or Gift of the Ox. So, we increased the proc rate of Elusive Brew and Gift of the Ox by 50%. Elusive Brew now adds up to 3 charges per crit: [1.5*WeaponSpeed/2.6] for 1H weapons, and [3.0*WeaponSpeed/3.6] for 2H weapons. Gift of the Ox now has a higher proc rate on white attacks: [0.03*WeaponSpeed] for 1H weapons, and [0.06*WeaponSpeed] for 2H weapons.

The T30 talents no longer proc Eminence, is this intended?
Yes. Monks are a new class and Mistweavers in particular use a very new style of healing, so this definitely has the potential to change, but our general philosophy is that abilities which do both damage and healing don’t need to cause Eminence. The only exception that we can recall offhand is Chi Torpedo and we may also change that to not cause Eminence to be consistent.

Also channeling CJL allows me to cast Enveloping Mist instantly, though Surging Mist does not do the same, so it feels like a bug that EM does become instant.
Yep, bug. We believe that was fixed in the most recent build.

Lastly, earlier in beta, we could cast Soothing Mist on one target, then EM on another. Recently, this is longer possible, though the CJL bug allows me to do it once again. Was it a bug being able to cast EM on anyone that wasn't Soothing Mist's target?
This is intended. Being able to cast Enveloping Mist and Surging Mist instantly while channeling Soothing Mist is intended to be used to pump more healing into the target you’re channeling. You’re not intended to just keep channeling Soothing Mist on anyone and be able to cast instant Enveloping/Surging on different people.

Paladin (Forums / Skills)Execution Sentence is consuming Glyph of Flash of Light, but is seeing no increase in the healing done. Is it supposed to consume the effect and receive the increase or is it not supposed to interact with the glyph at all?
Sounds like a bug. We’ll look into that.

The melee attack speed buff does not change the cooldown tooltips on abilities affected by Sanctity of Battle, for Retribution at least - and it doesn't seem like it's just tooltips not updating, but that they're not being affected at all. Is this intentional? Not that it would necessarily be a bad thing as long as we're balanced around Sanctity of Battle not benefiting from it.
This is intended. The raid buff you’re referring to increases melee and ranged attack speed, not haste. Sanctity of Battle only uses actual haste.

Shaman (Forums / Skills)It appears that there's a hidden ICD on stormlash that prevents synchronized mh+oh swings from both triggering the effect.
Yes, there is a very short ICD on Stormlash. We’ll look into whether we need to have that or not.

Hey, just workin on some spreadsheets and was wondering if anyone had the formulas for the following:

1. Healing Tide Totem
2. Healing Stream Totem
3. Earth Shield

I'm using the formulas given on wowhead/wowdb, but it would be nice to have the actual formulas (the numbers tend to be consistently off). Also, for Healing Tide, what's the min/max for it's heal (the tooltip only gives one number, but it's not acting like HST where you're getting the same heal 7 times in a row). Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Looks like the data minable formula for Healing Tide is accurate, but the tooltip is mistakenly only showing the minimum healing amount. It actually heals for that amount plus up to 798 at level 90. That’s before multipliers (like Purification and Mastery), by the way.

Healing Stream’s tooltip does indeed seem to be wrong. We’ll try to get that fixed. The actual healing amount (again, before multipliers), is 44.5% of SP.

1. Riptide is consuming both the unleashed life and fury buffs, yet only the direct portion is benefiting from the unleashed fury buff. Both the direct and hot portions are benefiting from unleashed life, but the hot is not being affected by unleashed fury.
And sounds like a bug. We’ll check it out.

2. Healing Rain is not consuming unleashed fury (it's working with unleashed life fine).
Not a bug! Unleashed Fury is a buff on the target and Healing Rain is a persistent AoE. We didn’t think you’d want it to just increase the crit chance of a single Healing Rain tick and then end up getting consumed by it.

Warlock (Forums / Skills)Wrathguard vs Felguard Head to Head Comparison [and other warlock testing]
Thanks for that. We recently did another pass on warlock pet damage and found (and fixed) a few more issues. The most recent build that went up should have resolved the issues. Please test it again and let us know what you find.

I am a bit confused with Glyph: Dark Soul (Destruction).
Without the glyph, Dark Soul grants 30% crit while active. With the glyph it grants 27% while active and 3% while off cooldown. Does that answer your question?

People from EJ ran test on Demo (special thanks to whi for his time) to find your hidden nerfs (you did say they were coming, but not updating tooltips is mean).
It’s not done out of meanness. We’re just applying many of our balance/tuning tweaks as hotfixes directly to beta, and that means the tooltips will be out of date until you get a new client build. That said, there are a few known bugs with warlock spells having the tooltip damage wrong, regardless of hotfixes involved. If you encounter any spells that give you grief when figuring out your formulas, let us know and we’ll try to help out. In general, we usually change both the base damage and SP scaling of a spell at the same time (though not necessarily by the same amounts). If you see only one of those change at a time, it’s a good hint that you may want to retest and make sure you’ve got the formula right.

Warrior (Forums / Skills)I've got a question about Berserker Stance. A recent post linked to a video of a Fire mage demonstrating burst. The target was a warrior, and over the course of a few seconds of high damage, its rage level jumped to full.

Unless I've missed a data dump, there's been a big knowledge gap about how the stance generates rage per damage (I, and I think a lot of other players didn't realize it was so dynamic). Any information you can give?
Sure. While in Berserker Stance, you gain 1 rage for every 1% of your health lost to damage.

Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Challenge Mode Dungeon Testing
The Challenge Modes for the Scholomance and Gate of the Setting Sun dungeons are now available for testing, and should remain open for at least several days. Yes, just those two dungeons for now.

A few relevant testing notes:

You must have completed the Heroic version of the dungeon once in order to attempt the challenge mode.

Item level will be normalized to 463.

There is no queue system for challenge modes; groups must be formed manually and you must zone in from the outside world.

While the challenge is active, the group leader may Reset the dungeon at any time via a drop-down accessible by right-clicking your unit frame.

On the live servers, gear will only scale down, not up.

Challenge modes do not drop loot of any kind, though they do award Valor for completion. You will be able to reset the instance mid-run on the live servers. You can run them as many times per day as you like.

Will we get the 5 instances per hour lockout on Challenge modes? This could be seen as extremely frustrating if we are trying to sort out a method for a beginning pull etc etc.
Resetting the instance while inside it, using the contextual menu option that is specific to challenge modes, does not count towards the lockout counter. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Challenge Mode DungeonsThey aren't AoE fests? They are actually as hard as the TBC ones? Can you also run them to gear up? Do they continue to drop the same items as the normal version? I'd much rather gear up like that!
Challenge dungeons don't drop upgrades. Actually, there's a mechanic in place that normalizes your gear, so that no matter what you have (that is, if you overgear it), you'll have the same difficulty you did before.

When you add the fact you'll be able to compare your times against other groups in your same realm, I'd say that might open up a very interesting competition to see which 5-man group is the best of the realm!

And as the reward for completing challenge dungeons, you'll have transmogrifiable gear. For example, the warlock challenge set has a close resemblance to Illidan's outfit (horns, tattoos and all). If you happen to have access to the Mists of Pandaria beta, you can check which gear you may acquire from the Challenge Dungeon vendor inside your faction city. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Challenge Mode GearWhy can't it have stats? I like the look of it and would use it w/o t-mogging it.
We want these to be prestige items that you can show off without them giving you power. The power stats will come from Raiding etc. These will be that extra 'oomph' to show others your accomplishment in taking things to the "next level" so to speak. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

LFR Loot System FeedbackSo I have a 4% chance at getting loot every single time I down a boss in LFR... Yeah, I don't think I'm going to bother with that. Pretty much a complete waste of time.
What gives you that idea? Your chance of receiving an item from a given boss is much, much higher than that. If it were 4%, you'd expect to see on average one player per LFR kill receive an item, and that is far from the reality.

On average, you'll see about as much loot dropping in 5.0 as you do today in the live 4.3 game. The only difference with the new system is that any loot obtained is guaranteed to be designed for use by your spec (whereas on live you may have "wasted" loot, such as a tank shield dropping in a raid where the only tanks are a druid and a DK). In general, your odds of getting the item that you want will be higher in 5.0 -- often significantly higher depending on how contested your item of choice would be -- than they are today.

whereas on live you may have "wasted" loot, such as a tank shield dropping in a raid where the only tanks are a druid and a DK...

Isn't the point of the new system that you still get this wasted loot, but it just takes a different form? Like, if your tanks already have a shield they still get given a shield by the system (and thus said loot is wasted), but it means that you can't even get some marginal benefit from that shield by having someone win it with a greed roll for their offspec.
No, because everyone's chance at loot is independent. If the tank in my group gets a duplicate shield, that has no effect whatsoever on my chance at getting loot. It doesn't matter if 20 people in my group need drops from a given boss, or if only 3 do. Either way, my own personal chance is unaffected.

I know it seems like a bit of a black box that sometimes magically spits out epics. However, objectively, you will obtain the gear want more quickly from LFR under the 5.0 system than you did in 4.3, in every case except the special circumstance where you had an entire guild group funneling you gear. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Wrathgate ScenarioHmm I like this idea But blizzard wouldn't do it, Like blizzard have said many times, they want the game to keep moving forward other than going back to old content
We are aware and do acknowledge that there are people would like us to focus some more on renewing old content, but we do indeed want the game to progress and evolve with new content.

It has previously been said that adding new content is something we feel is generally more exciting than renewing old content, and this is still true today. Renewing existing content can be great in some situations, especially if it is content that is very popular or if it is content that hasn't been experienced by a large portion of the player-base, but in generally we feel it is better to spend our resources on creating new content that is fresh for everyone.

Existing content has been renewed before though, and it is most likely going to happen again in the future in some form. Even though there are no immediate plans for it, perhaps we will one day get to see the Wrathgate and the fight for the Undercity converted into scenarios. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Patch 5.0.4 and all RacesSo basically I just wasted $60 for nothing.. Everyone who doesn't own MoP will get to play a monk / panda for free??? yay spending money for apparent reason is awesome.. Thank you blizz *slow sarcastic clap*
All classes are not becoming available with the patch. Only the races and the pandaren won't be playable until the release of Mists of Pandaria when the starting area opens up as well and the expansion begins.

You're getting more than just a new race with the expansion anyway and I'd hope that the pandaren aren't the only thing you are purchasing the expansion for.

*Of note, while we always love feedback and to hear how people feel about these things, it's always important to remain as constructive as possible. This will help us understand what you don't like in particular as well as avoid any potential flame wars from other community members who may think you're simply just trying to stir up trouble. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Patch 5.0.4 Downloaddoes this 6 GB include the background downloader data that's already available? or is it 6 GB excluding the 6 GB some of us already downloaded via the background downloader?
The 6GB download I am referring to is the one coming from the background download.

How do I start the background downloader? Or how do I tell if I have already finished downloading it?
It is a sneaky little thing and hard to notice. In the launcher next to the "play" button it will say "Downloading data for the next update". You can see its progress by clicking the "Info" drop down and choosing "Connection info".

Hope that helps, if it you need more assistance or information you can always contact our friendly support staff for more help. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)